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" Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Parody
Lesson
Satire
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" A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. "
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" You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Count
Always
Style
" A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Society
Only
Important
" The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Breaking
Wave
Sea
" Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Harm
People
Happy
" Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Before
Complacency
Being
" Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Rational
Poetry
Through
" Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Enjoy
Enjoy Life
Imagination
" A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Fiction
Original
Masterpiece
" The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Sense
Nonsense
Evolution
" I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Think
You
Stronger
" It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Only
Hard
More
" The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Darkness
Common Sense
Us
" I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Child
Like
Speak
" The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Girl
Mind
Good
" No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Less
Pathetic
Created
" Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Existence
Vast
Obscure
" A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. "
Vladimir Nabokov
More
Like
Home
" I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Mind
Right
Anybody
" Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Painting
Long
Rather
" I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Time
Reading
Move
" Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Once
Past
Associated
" I confess, I do not believe in time. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Believe
Time
Confess
" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Up
Snow
Imagination
" All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Blush
Matter
Me
" I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Away
Past
Pine
" To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Play
Power
Triumph
" There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Mediocrity
World
Group
" There is only one school of literature - that of talent. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature
Talent
Only
" My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Music
Simple
Oppression